In Her Name

and the city’s three aerospace defense sites. Just in case.

Hawthorne paused a moment, nodding to someone who was speaking into his headset. “Walken says he’s ready when you are.” First Lieutenant Rudi Walken commanded the mechanized detachment: one platoon of armored skimmers and one of tanks that Reza had been given from the regiment’s armored battalion. Like the artillery, it was a choice luxury that filled Reza with suspicion. Such units were very precious, especially in the Red Legion, and were not allocated without a great deal of forethought by regimental command. While the detachment was small in size, there likely were few weapons on Erlang that could destroy the armored skimmers, and nothing that could touch Walken’s five tanks.

“Very well,” he said, grabbing his helmet and rifle. While officers were supposed to only carry sidearms, ostensibly to force them to lead the fight instead of acting as another rifleman, Reza carried both. Sometimes having an extra rifleman made the difference between victory and defeat. As always, the Empress’s dagger clung to his waist, while the Desh-Ka short sword given him by Tesh-Dar lay sheathed at his back. “You have the con, captain.”

“Aye, sir,” Washington acknowledged. While the exchange was a Navy tradition, Reza had become fond of it and had adopted it for when he delegated his authority to one of his subordinates to take command of the company in his absence. “Good luck.”

Reza frowned. He feared that they would need it. “Come with me, Zevon,” he said as he passed the younger man, who stood at attention for his commander.

“Sir,” he said, following at Reza’s heels. In his left hand he carried the plastisteel case that contained the computer interface and the other materials he needed to keep the administration of the company together, as well as some more mundane items with which he took notes and drafted messages for his commander. In the other hand, he carried his rifle. While at any given time he was the company clerk, commander’s adjutant, or one of a hundred other things as needed, he was a rifleman first and always.

Outside, Reza quickly surveyed his company’s positions. As he knew it would be, all was in order. “Captain,” Eustus said as he met Reza beside the armored skimmer that would carry him into the city, “be careful.”

Reza suppressed a smile at his friend’s words. Eustus had turned out to be what some of his troops had termed a perfect mother hen.

“We will be back before dusk,” Reza said. Eustus nodded and stepped back as Reza and Zevon squirmed through the skimmer’s hatch, Zevon closing it behind them.

“Rudi,” Reza said through his helmet’s comm link as he folded himself into one of the skimmer’s seats, fighting the claustrophobic reaction he always suffered when he had to ride in armored vehicles, “it is time.”

“Roger,” Walken replied. The convoy was made up of the skimmer carrying Reza, Zevon, and a rifle squad, sandwiched between the two tanks of the tank platoon’s light section. The other three tanks and seven skimmers would remain here with the company. Content that everything was in order, Walken spoke into his helmet microphone. “Convoy Alpha, this is Alpha One. Move out.”

The heads of over two hundred Marines swiveled in unison to watch the little convoy depart. The air crackled and the ground shook as the two tanks lifted on their anti-gravity screens. Titans of surface warfare, each massed over two hundred tons and carried enough firepower to level a small city, with armor that protected them from all but the most horrendous weapons the enemy could bring to bear. A legacy of mankind’s self destructive age, the modern tank had no equal in the armory of the Kreelans, and it was behemoths like these that had turned the tide in many a battle from disastrous defeat to life-preserving victory. Alas, their great power came only at an astronomical cost in labor and resources, and there were never enough of them to go around.

As the two turreted monsters began to move forward, the bottoms of their armored hulls borne a meter from the ground, the much lighter and more agile skimmer lifted and quickly took its place between its larger cousins, its thinner hide protected by their bulk and potential menace.

* * *

“They’re coming down The Lane, now,” Mallory City’s mayor, the Honorable Crory Wittmann, said from the balcony as he watched the Marine vehicles thunder down the main thoroughfare of the city, which fortunately was wide enough for the tanks. People had poured out of buildings at the noise, thinking perhaps that an earthquake was in the making. Such was their surprise when they saw the house-sized shapes rumbling past their shops and apartments, the camouflaged flanks of the vehicles adorned with the seal of the Confederation followed by the word MARINES in tall black letters. “God, look at the size of those things!” he said excitedly, like a young boy seeing his first parade.

President Belisle glowered from his chair, his face a cherry red that reflected the anger still boiling inside him. What else could go wrong? he thought acidly to himself as he considered berating Wittmann for being such an impressionable imbecile. The Ranier Alliance was in trouble, big trouble, and people like Wittmann were too stupid to see it. First the Mallorys began to think they were equals instead of just the laborers they had always been, holding strikes and forming their own underground political party, as if any of the brutes understood what politics was really all about. Then the Territorial Army, which Belisle and his predecessors had gone to great lengths to maintain as a club to keep the Mallorys in their place in the mines, had begun to mutiny in the provinces after having to carry out a few jobs against the workers there. No bloody stomach for it, Belisle thought savagely, cursing the weaklings who had been in charge. A few summary executions had settled that issue – for the moment, at least – but Belisle and the Alliance were no longer content to rely on the Territorial Army outside of the colony’s major population centers, including Mallory City.

He pursed his lips as if he had just sucked down a lemon. Mallory City. The name made him want to spit, but it had been a necessary compromise when it had been chosen. Bloody beggars.

All that was bad enough, he thought. But being snubbed by an arrogant Marine – a captain, no less! – was far, far too much. He was going to send good Senator Borge a very choice set of words as thanks for the support he had promised. The cargo ships that streamed through Erlang’s ports to carry away their loads of metal and minerals for the Confederation must not be worth very much to the man and the Council if they could only spare a niggardly company of Marines to help keep the Mallorys at work. Taking into account the ships that carried away cargoes for personal consumption by certain political figures, the tiny contingent he had been apportioned made little sense, indeed. Belisle’s face tightened, his mouth compressing to a thin line. The Marine captain was going to learn a lesson or two about how to deal with the sovereign leader of Erlang.

The Marine tanks took up station on opposite ends of the square in front of the parliament building. The skimmer pulled up to the steps of the Assembly Building in front of an assemblage of shocked legislators who had been awaiting the arrival of a ceremonial procession, not a tactical deployment.

Three stories below the balcony on which Wittmann stood, four heavily armed and armored Marines emerged from the skimmer and took up deceptively casual positions beside the vehicle, their weapons at port arms, their eyes in constant motion, alert for any sign of trouble. Reza and Zevon followed them out and silently returned the gaze of the speechless legislators until Reza finally spoke.

“Will you take me to President Belisle, please?” he asked a man in a dull gray woolen suit that passed for high fashion in Erlang’s capital city. The man looked around for a moment, as if expecting someone to come to his aid. After no one made any sign of addressing the situation, he turned back to Reza.

“Er, this way… captain,” he said, resigned to the fact that he had been charged with the irritant that had enraged the president, and Belisle was not known for his kindness toward bearers of bad news.

“Thank you,” Reza said with as much courtesy as he could muster in what struck him as an intolerably arrogant atmosphere. He did not need his special senses to tell him this was the case. It was plainly written on their faces.

Leaving the rest of his escort with the skimmer, Reza and Zevon (who reluctantly left his rifle in their vehicle) followed their unwilling guide through the gawking crowd, whose mood had soured to the point of outright surliness. Zevon shot a deadly glance at someone who muttered something about his parentage. The man shut up and turned away.

After leading them upstairs, their unwilling guide paused at a set of enormous and outrageously ornate doors that looked entirely out of place in the building’s modern architectural style of whites, grays, and blacks, of classic geometric shapes. Two nervous Territorial Army soldiers stood guard outside.

“The president is through these doors,” their guide said curtly. “You will, of course, excuse me if I don’t accompany you.” As if afraid that he was going to be physically beaten for some unnamed transgression, the man